The Cure

At 70, Manhattan Lawyer Alfred H. Holbrook seemed an incurable collector of paintings. He was, he says, "like a toper who took one swig at the fount of art appreciation and went on a 40-year binge." Between sprees, Collector Holbrook wanted to find out why the habit had such a hold on him. This year he enrolled as an art student at the University of Georgia in Athens, where his classmates were 61 coeds. Last week he still had no logical explanation of his craving for art. But grateful Student Holbrook had presented his entire $175,000 collection, acquired over four decades, to his new alma mater. Forty of his best items went on exhibition in the university's library.

A first-rate group of 19th-and 20th-century U.S. pictures, the collection included : Winslow Homer's Sunflower Pickaninny, Sargent's portrait of Joe Jefferson as Rip van Winkle, Whistler's Red Rosalie of Lyme Regis, George Luks's Plaza Cabbie, George Bellows' Sea Spume, canvases by John Sloane, Marsden Hartley, John Marin.

Collector Holbrook took a good, long look at the show and was seized with a new urge which promised to be even less curable than his old habit of collecting: he sat down and dashed off a painting of his own.

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